How To Make Your Haunted House, Part 1: Setting the Stage

by Ellen in Instructional / 10.15.08

My uncle Dan would become giddy over the thought of scaring the pants off of the neighborhood kids, and would consider his haunted house a total success only if he could make at least one kid cry like a baby.

He would build elaborate haunted houses in his garage every year, and everyone in the neighborhood came to expect nothing but the best from him. At any given point on Halloween night, there would be hundreds of kids lined up down the street waiting to walk through.

How do you build a scary haunted house?

Start with the infrastructure. It helps to sketch out your haunted house first so that you can adequately plan out your space. I would also recommend using an outside space like a garage, driveway, backyard or side yard because it will get messy. However, you will need access to power, so it cannot be too far away from the house.

The first thing my uncle did was build out a simple plywood drop ceiling. This drop ceiling provided the infrastructure he needed to make his walls out of black plastic sheeting. Another solution is to use 2 x 4s or PVC pipes to build out wall frames and then cover them with black, plastic (trash bag) sheeting. When building out your infrastructure, try to make little coves and blindspots for your scares. In a two car garage, my uncle had 4 ‘hallways,’ so to speak, that you had to wind through before you got to the exit.

In addition, he used a camping tent set up as a side feature. People had to walk up to it and unzip it to look inside. There would be some very benign scene inside, like sleeping bags with teddy bears, and then right when the person would think it was nothing, something really scary would happen.

The next step is to plan out your featured horrors. You want to have at least two features per pathway and then you can fill in the gaps afterwards. The magic behind terror is timing, creating misdirection and diversions so you can catch the visitor totally off guard.

An example of diversion is a table with a mummy in a casket on top. When a visitor passes the casket, curiosity forces them to look inside. Wait until they look into the casket, then jump out in a mad, monster costume or have the mummy be not quite dead. If you are using misdirection, the visitor would be looking at the mummy in the casket and the big scare would come from the opposite side of the room, where they least expect it.

Another trick is to time your visitors so they are properly spaced out. Send one or two people through at a time, with a good 30 seconds of spacing in between. People tend to get scared, stop, and become bunched up. It will ruin your scares if people start stacking up inside. Plus it is much scarier to walk into a haunted house alone or in groups of two.

Also, don’t forget your sounds. There will be lots of screams and loud noises naturally coming from the actor/volunteers and visitors but you still need scary music and screaming sounds coming off of a speaker. Another tactic is to use kiddie Halloween music to have visitors drop their guard.

Check back tomorrow for 10 ideas that will scare the pants off your visitors.